Statement from Cllr Peter John on ballots on estate regeneration

29 September 2017

At this week’s Labour Party Conference Jeremy Corbyn set out
with passion and conviction how a Labour government will invest in social and
council housing, this is something we welcome and builds on our programme for
11,000 new council homes. We have shown this is possible but with a Labour
government investing in this area then we can do even more to tackle the
housing crisis.

Jeremy also set out the need for ballots for any new estate
regeneration and reprovision of existing council homes, it is already our
policy in Southwark to only consider any new estate regeneration if it leads to
an increase in the amount of council homes on the site. We must remember that
our housing economy is broken and the failure of successive governments to
invest in proper social housing has meant that any radical plans to improve
existing housing estates have become the subject of intense scrutiny.
Until we are able to move the debate on from the terms of reference for housing
provision set in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher we will have to demonstrate that
what we are doing genuinely improves the lives of our residents. We will
carefully consider introducing ballots for any future estate regeneration
projects, but we currently have none planned. At a time when the Tories are
attacking social housing it is councils like Southwark that have taken a stand
and invested £425m in our existing 55,000 council homes and have now begun our
programme to build 11,000 new council homes by 2043.